Artificial Intelligence

Dear students,

we just published the results of the second AI exam.

Due to COVID-19, the inspection needs to be organized somewhat differently than usual. In particular, you will need to register for an inspection slot on Wednesday afternoon (in HS002) and are only allowed to show up and inspect your exam during this slot.

The registration for the inspection slots will open this evening at 6pm. This will be first come first served, so try to register as soon as possible if you have any restrictions on Wednesday. The registration will close on Tuesday, 23:59 and your seats will be published on Wednesday morning. Please check which seat you have been assigned to before arriving to the exam inspection.

Further, note the following requirement about masks at the exam inspection:
If you are planning to attend the exam inspection of Artificial Intelligence, please note that it is absolutely necessary for you to bring your own protection mask with you. Students who have a doctor’s certificate that they cannot wear protection masks have to bring their own face shields and wear these instead of a mask.

We will let you know about further details regarding the inspection in due time.

Best regards,

Your AI-team

Dear AI course students,

after all the stress with the exams is over, I invite you to participate in an exciting AI project conducted by one of your fellow students. Do machines need to have their own distinct voice? How could it sound? Particpate in the survey below to explore more ...

https://www.soscisurvey.de/synthvoice/

All the best and thank you

Jana Koehler

Dear students,

if you attend the exam tomorrow, please read this news carefully. It includes many rules and organizational information that will be important to smoothly run the exam.

Pre-exam/general information:

• The exam will take 2 hours.
• The exam will have enough empty pages to write the solution on, no need to bring your own paper.
• You are not allowed to use a pocket calculator (nor any other electronic device).
• Remember to bring your student ID.
• Start time is 2pm, the rooms will be open from around 1:45pm. Please be on time!
• Make sure you know the room and seat that you are placed in. You can find this information on your CMS status page.
• Please enter the exam rooms only by the doors indicated on the following map (for the lecture halls in E1.3, there are no special rules): https://cms.sic.saarland/ai_20/dl/110/Exam_Room_Entrances.pdf
• Please do not form big crowds in front of the exam room entrances to ensure the required safety distance.
• Wear your mask when entering the exam room.

During the exam:

• We will check your student IDs before the exam will actually start. We do so because you will still have to have your mask on during this process, so it hopefully leads to less distraction during the exam.

• In case you have a question, or need to go to the washroom, during the exam, please signal (raise your hand) and wait until we approach you. In both cases, you will need to wear you mask.

After the exam:

• When the time is up, stop writing immediately, and keep seated. If you keep writing, the page of your exam you were still writing on will not be corrected.

• We will ask you to come to the front one-by-one (including all your belongings!), please wait for your turn. You will drop the exam in a box and leave room.

Best regards,

Sophia

Dear Students,

on behalf of the faculty I want to inform you about the following safety rules for the upcoming exam tomorrow. If you are admitted to the AI exam, please read the following information carefully.

(1) Please note that it is absolutely necessary for you to bring your own protection mask with you.

We strongly recommend that you wear the mask during the entire exam to protect yourself and others. You must wear the protection mask when entering and leaving the room.

(2) If your answer is "yes" to one or more of the following questions, then you are urgently requested not to attend the exam. If you provide a doctor’s certificate to the examination office later on, the examination attempt will be cancelled and will not count.

- Did you have definite contact with a Covid-19 patient, who was tested positive, in the last 14 days?

- Have you recently experienced any of the following symptoms?
◦ Cough / Husten
◦ Sore throat / Halsschmerzen
◦ Nasal congestion / runny nose / Schnupfen
◦ Diarrhoea /Durchfall
◦ Fever /Fieber
◦ Aches and pains / Gliederschmerzen
◦ Loss of smell (e.g. no longer able to smell burnt food) / Geruchsverlust
◦ Loss of taste (e.g. unable to distinguish when food is burnt) / Geschmacksverlust”

Dear all,

some Information for all of you planning to come to/register for the exam inspection:

Dear students,

we just published the results of the first exam. This is the grading scheme:

1.0     >= 95 points

1.3     90 ≤ points < 95

1.7     85 ≤ points < 90

2.0     80 ≤ points < 85

2.3     75 ≤ points < 80

2.7     70 ≤ points < 75

3.0     65 ≤ points < 70

3.3     60 ≤ points < 65

3.7     55 ≤ points < 60

4.0     50 ≤ points < 55

5.0     < 50 points

As announced before, the registration for the exam inspection on Thursday will open today at 6pm. You will only be able to inspect your exam if you are registered for a slot.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

we are almost done with the correction of the exam and expect to publish the results on Monday afternoon.

Due to COVID-19, the inspection needs to be organized somewhat differently than usual. In particular, you will need to register for an inspection slot on Thursday afternoon and are only allowed to show up and inspect your exam during this slot.

The registration for the inspection slots will open Monday evening at 6pm. This will be first come first served, so try to register as soon as possible if you have any restrictions on Thursday. The registration will close on Tuesday, 23:59.

We will let you know about further details regarding the inspection in due time.

Best regards,
Daniel

Dear students,

if you attend the first exam tomorrow, please read this news carefully. It includes many rules and organizational information that will be important to smoothly run the exam.

Pre-exam/general information:

• The exam will take 2 hours.
• The exam will have enough empty pages to write the solution on, no need to bring your own paper.
• You are not allowed to use a pocket calculator (nor any other electronic device).
• Remember to bring your student ID.
• Start time is 2pm, the rooms will be open from around 1:45pm. Please be on time!
• Make sure you know the room and seat that you are placed in. You can find this information on your CMS status page.
• Please enter the exam rooms only by the doors indicated on the following map (for the Aula and the lecture halls in E1.3, there are no special rules): https://cms.sic.saarland/ai_20/dl/110/Exam_Room_Entrances.pdf
• Please do not form big crowds in front of the exam room entrances to ensure the required safety distance.
• Wear your mask when entering the exam room.

During the exam:

• We will check your student IDs before the exam will actually start. We do so because you will still have to have your mask on during this process, so it hopefully leads to less distraction during the exam.

• In case you have a question, or need to go to the washroom, during the exam, please signal (raise your hand) and wait until we approach you. In both cases, you will need to wear you mask.

After the exam:

• When the time is up, stop writing immediately, and keep seated. If you keep writing, the page of your exam you were still writing on will not be corrected.

• We will ask you to come to the front one-by-one (including all your belongings!), please wait for your turn. You will drop the exam in a box and leave room.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear Students,

on behalf of the faculty I want to inform you about the following safety rules for the upcoming exam tomorrow. If you are admitted to the AI exam, please read the following information carefully.

(1) Please note that it is absolutely necessary for you to bring your own protection mask with you.

We strongly recommend that you wear the mask during the entire exam to protect yourself and others. You must wear the protection mask when entering and leaving the room.

(2) If your answer is "yes" to one or more of the following questions, then you are urgently requested not to attend the exam. If you provide a doctor’s certificate to the examination office later on, the examination attempt will be cancelled and will not count.

- Did you have definite contact with a Covid-19 patient, who was tested positive, in the last 14 days?

- Have you recently experienced any of the following symptoms?
◦ Cough / Husten
◦ Sore throat / Halsschmerzen
◦ Nasal congestion / runny nose / Schnupfen
◦ Diarrhoea /Durchfall
◦ Fever /Fieber
◦ Aches and pains / Gliederschmerzen
◦ Loss of smell (e.g. no longer able to smell burnt food) / Geruchsverlust
◦ Loss of taste (e.g. unable to distinguish when food is burnt) / Geschmacksverlust”

If you have questions or in case of doubt, please send an email to jana.koehler@dfki.de

Dear students,

we just published the seating plans for the first exam. Every registered student should have a seat assigned, which is visible on your status page under "Exam Seats".

If you did not get a seat assigned, but registered for the exam, please let us know immediately. Otherwise you will not be able to participate in the exam.

We will let you know about the details on how the exam will be held in the next few days.

Kind regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

the registration deadline for the exam in CMS has passed.

From all students who cannot register for AI in the HISPOS/LSF system, we need an email (to Daniel Höller) to confirm your registration. In the email, please indicate your course of studies.

This is mostly relevant for students outside the CS department (though some CS-courses cannot register for AI in HISPOS, either).

Deadline for the email is tomorrow (July 15, 23:59).

On a side note, please keep in mind that the HISPOS registration closes today midnight.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

in my parts of the lecture (ai0A, ai0B, ai01-ai04, ai08, ai11, ai14), the following lectures are NOT exam-relevant:

ai0A, ai0B, ai14

In the other lectures, all content that is not marked with a star is NOT exam-relevant. However, note that illustrating examples are usually not marked with a star, but the slides preceeding these example introducing the respective method or algorithm are marked with a star if the method or algorithm is exam-relevant.

I wish you all the best for the exam

Jana Koehler

Dear students,

in the spirit of the usual course evaluation at our university, which unfortunately is not possible for our lecture this semester, we would like to evaluate how you perceived the lecture this semester, given the special circumstances. We ask you to first provide some details about yourself, though this is totally optional. The second part is specific to the virtual setting which we were forced to adopt, the last part is close to the usual evaluation form, which many of you have probably seen before.

We will post the link to the evaluation form in the forum.

It is completely anonymous.

You do not have to participate, but we encourage everyone to do so, since the feedback will be greatly helpful to us, and allow us to do a better job in future iterations of the course. To cover the special circumstances in the current semester, we ask you in particular to make use of the free text fields to give us your feedback about the organization of the online lecture and how you made use of the options we offered to you.

The form is available from now on until Sunday (July 19), 11:45pm.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

in my parts of the lecture (chapters ai 05, 06, 07, 09, 10, 12, 13), everything is exam-relevant EXCEPT the parts marked wiith "for reference". These are:

ai07 slide 23, slides 41 -- 43, and Section ``AlphaGo/Zero Architecture''.

ai12 Sections ``The History of Planning'' and ``The PDDL Language''.

ai13 slide 52 and Section ``An Overview of Advanced Results''.

best,

Jörg
 

Dear students,

We have created a new theoretical exercise sheet about the second part of the planning lecture. This sheet is voluntary and will not be graded. However, the topics covered are still relevant for the exam, and we want to give you the opportunity to test your understanding of the topics. You an find it as usual in the materials section.

It will be discussed in the regular tutorials and in the additional tutorials on planning next week.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

we decided to offer a couple of additional tutorials next week, in favor of the "exam preparation lecture", as a preparation for the exams.

We will offer two of these additional tutorials for every of the following pairs of topics:

• Search & Planning
• Propositional Logic & Predicate Logic
• Knowledge Representation & Machine Learning
• Adversarial Search & CSP

Please check the calendar for the individual tutorial slots.

In these tutorials, the tutors will present the solutions of additional exercises covering the respective topics. After that, more importantly, there is time for you to ask questions about the two topics covered in the tutorial.

To be able to better organize the tutorials, we ask you to post the questions you want to be answered in the tutorials in the new category of the forum (Additional Tutorials for Exam Preparation). We have already added one thread per topic in the category. Please only use this thread to ask your questions. You can also suggest types of exercises you want to see more examples of.

Deadline for questions and exercise suggestions is Tuesday (July 14), 4pm.

The exercises presented in the tutorials will be the same for both slots of each pair of topics.

Although we allocate two hours for each of the tutorials, the tutors are instructed to finish the tutorials early if there are no more questions from your side. Thus, be on time and familiarize yourself with the topics before attending the tutorial. That way, you will be able to get the most out of it.

The additional tutorials will be scheduled as Microsoft Teams meeting using the "Artificial Intelligence lecture (summer 2020)" group. Details on how to join the MS Teams group can be found here.

Best regards,

Daniel

ps. Sorry for the spamming, but as someone asked me in the CMS feedback to announce what I will teach in the upcoming winter term, I wanted to draw your attention to the news item below again.

I'll be teaching the Automatic Planning course, which is the main prerequisite if you wanna do work in my research group.

I'll also be teaching part of "Elements of Data Science and AI", but that's a 1st-term course (for our DSAI program).

I'll probably also teach a seminar, but that isn't decided yet.

In any case, if you're interested then please check the FAI web pages http://fai.cs.uni-saarland.de/ when the winter term draws nearer.

===

Hi all,

By ways of saying "Good-Bye", I just wanted to briefly draw your attention to these slides in chapter 13:

http://fai.cs.uni-saarland.de/hoffmann/PlanningCourse-FAI.pdf

If you're interested in doing a BSc/MSc thesis in my research group FAI, or getting a student assistant job in FAI, you should take the Automatic Planning course in the upcoming winter term. The slides give an outline of the course and of the currently active research topics in FAI.

I hope you enjoyed the lectures. Good luck in the exams!

best,

Jörg

Dear all,

I hope you'll excuse my misusing this forum for announcing an important job ad. We're looking for student assistants helping with programming tasks in the setup of an online conference.

My research group is part of the organizing team for this year's International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling:
https://icaps20.icaps-conference.org/

We are considering to go online, as many other conferences are doing right now. This raises many challenges (time zones, web page organization, integration of online meeting/chat systems, social events), but also comes with many opportunities relative to traditional on-site conferences (persistent discussion channels, opportunities for audiences who could not normally participate, outreach to other scientific communities). Our goal is to tackle these challenges in a manner that may also set an example for the future when online conferences might become a regular setup to reduce travel (and thus CO2 emissions).

We are not yet sure whether we actually *will* go online. I am however looking for possible student assistants already now, so that, if the decision is taken, we can begin with the work right away. We expect that a decision will be taken by end of July, with the implementation works beginning in August.

If you could be interested at all, please send me an email, briefly describing your background and interests.

Grüße,
Jörg

Dear students,

the CMS registration for the first exam is now open. As soon as you fulfill the requirements, i.e. you passed 7/9 theoretical sheets and 3/4 practical sheets, you can register yourself for the first exam on your personal status page. The CMS registration is open until one week before the exam, July 14, 2pm.

Note that you have to register for the exam in CMS, otherwise you cannot participate!

In addition to the CMS registration, you might have to register for the exam at your respective examination office (Prüfungssekretariat). For most of you, this should be the HISPOS registration. If you are unsure about this point, please contact your examination office.

The exam will take place on July 21, starting at 2pm, on campus, distributed across several lecture halls. We will inform you in advance regarding the details about how exactly the exam will be organized.

Kind regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

given the high interest of many of you in the last office hour, we decided to offer another one for Practical Sheet 4.

The office hour will be next Thursday (July 2) from 10am to 12pm. The office hour will be organized via MS Teams as a meeting of our AI lecture group.

Everyone is allowed to join.

In the first part of the office hour, we will briefly go over the practical sheet. For the main part, it is up to you to ask questions about the sheet. There will be tutors available to answer individual questions in private Teams calls. You can of course ask your questions in the plenary session as well.

Best regards,

Daniel

monday:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YmJhYTdhYWUtNzlhNS00ODUxLWE3NGUtM2YwYTI3MDRhMWJi%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2267610027-1ac3-49b6-8641-ccd83ce1b01f%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22369b7a84-7747-4306-b4a2-a69dfb62eca7%22%2c%22IsBroadcastMeeting%22%3atrue%7d

tuesday:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ODY4Y2FhOGQtMjUwNy00OTY3LTkzMjQtMDk2MzM0MTZhNGNi%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2267610027-1ac3-49b6-8641-ccd83ce1b01f%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22369b7a84-7747-4306-b4a2-a69dfb62eca7%22%2c%22IsBroadcastMeeting%22%3atrue%7d

Dear students,

some of you requested some additional help to get started with the practical exercise sheets. We will offer an office hour next Wednesday (June 17) from 2pm to 4pm. The office hour will be organized via MS Teams as a meeting of our AI lecture group.

Everyone is allowed to join.

In the first part of the office hour, we will briefly go over the practical sheet and show a demonstration of the Protege tool that you will need to use (so be on time). For the main part, it is up to you to ask questions about the sheet. There will be tutors available to answer individual questions in private Teams calls. You can of course ask your questions in the plenary session as well.

Depending on your participation, we might also organize an office hour for the last practical sheet.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

it emerged in the discussion today that the definition of "disagreement set", slide 24 of Chapter 6, was ambigous.

I have fixed this now. The post-handouts are available in the materials section. I will briefly explain the modified definition in the next lecture, before we proceed to Chapter 7.

Note: Chapter 7 will be about game playing, including in particular an overview of the AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, and AlphaZero system family. Hope to see many of you there!

best,

Jörg

Hi all,

the materials page now contains the post-handouts, YouTube link (under Recorded Lectures), and whiteboard notes (under Supplementary Materials).

Note: the post-handouts are only up to as far as we got today. The full post-handouts are always uploaded once the respective chapter is finished.

best,

Jörg

Dear students,

to experiment with a setting that allows more direct interaction, I will do my lectures in zoom (i.e., I will try this out and see how it goes).

The zoom meeting links will be given in the calendar entries, like previously for Teams. (It's a recurring zoom meeting, so the link will actually always be the same)

I will stream these lectures to YouTube, for two purposes:

1. After lecture: For you to re-watch the lectures later. The links to the videos will be put into the materials after the lecture.

2. During lecture: For you to attend the lecture passively if you want to, without being in the zoom meeting. To do this, you have to log into the zoom meeting at the start to get the YouTube Live stream link from there. Once you opened  the link in your browser you can leave the zoom meeting again.

See you all in zoom next week (my first lecture is on Tuesday 19),

Jörg Hoffmann

Dear all,

We created a MS Teams Group for the AI Lectures a while ago and have realised that many of you are not members of this group yet. We intend to also use this Group to communicate with you and might start using it to post the links to the lectures (once everyone has their University account). It would hence be great, if you all joined this group! The Registration Code can be found in the Forum: https://fai-forum.cs.uni-saarland.de/t/microsoft-teams-group-for-lectures/981

For the recordings of the lectures: The Materials page now contains links to the Recordings in the "Recorded Lectures" Section.

All the best
Sophia

Dear Students,

the slides for the first 3 chapters I will teach are now also availabe under materials.

To avoid confusion: for the chapters I teach, there are two different sets of slides: (1) pre-handout and (2) post-handout. Before the lecture I upload (1), after the lecture I upload (2). This is because I will ask you questions during the lectures; slides (2), but not slides (1), contain the answers.

best,

Jörg

Dear students,

We have now assigned the tutorials. If you log in to the CMS you can find your tutorial on the "personal status" page.

Forming Groups
You can now start/proceed forming groups. Please do so by using the forum. All members of a group need to be in the same tutorial. You do not need to mail the group members to anybody (the tutors or me). Please write them down on the solutions you hand in (as specified on the exercise sheets). You can start working in your new group right away (i.e. on the exercise sheet that is already available).

Changing Tutorials
You can change your tutorial if and only if you find somebody who wants to swap the group with you. So if you want e.g. to be in Tutorial 3 and are in Tutorial 2, please go to the forum and find somebody who is in Tutorial 3 and wants to be in Tutorial 2. Then write a single e-mail per swap to me (Daniel Höller). Please use the following template and put the student you want to swap with in CC:

mail subject:
Changing Tutorials

mail content:
Full Name 1    from    Tutorial A    to    Tutorial B
Full Name 2    from    Tutorial B    to    Tutorial A

Best regards,
Daniel

Dear all,

The first Theoretical Exercise Sheet will be released after the lecture today. You will have one week (until the 12th of May at 23:59) to upload your solutions to the CMS. From now on, there will be a new sheet released every Tuesday and you will always have one week to hand in your solutions.

You can work in groups of up to three people (all members of the group must however be assigned to the same tutorial). If you are still looking for submission partners, it is recommended to ask in the forum of the CMS in the category "Student Room".

All the best
Sophia

Dear students,

We have updated the tutorial slots so that you now have more options to choose from. Please have a second look, set/update your preferences and make sure that your settings have not been corrupted by the update.

The tutorials will soon be assigned, so please make sure to do so as soon as possible.

Best regards,
Daniel

Dear all,

my internet connection is stable, but the event got suddenly interrupted and I cannot connect to the new link myself. I will now upload the podcasts for today´s lecture, which I have recorded.

I am very sorry and hope the podcasts help. Please try to listen to them until tomorrow when we make another attempt to broadcast the lecture.

all the best

Jana Koehler

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YTk0ZDhhYWQtNTY1OC00NmZhLThkYjEtN2RjODJlMTZlMzIx%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2267610027-1ac3-49b6-8641-ccd83ce1b01f%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22369b7a84-7747-4306-b4a2-a69dfb62eca7%22%2c%22IsBroadcastMeeting%22%3atrue%7d

I will resume now as the live stream got interrupted unexpectedly

Dear Students,

the links to MS Teams live streams that we use to broadcast the lecture have been added to the timetable that you find under the information section in the CMS.

Please note:

- If you join later you will watch the stream from the beginning. There is no possibility to wind forward.

- I will go through the slides and pause after a certain unit of material to allow for questions that you can post in written form in the F&A board. There is no possibility to have an interactive discussion in a live stream.

- Every lecture live stream has its own link.

See you on monday!

Dear students,

like indicated on Monday, we decided to do the tutorials discussing the first (voluntary) theoretical sheet in the lecture slots next Monday/Tuesday. To not collide with the CS department kick-off meeting, we will only start the Monday tutorials at 5pm.

The tutors will post details regarding how to join the MS Teams tutorials sessions in the forum. There will be four tutorials, probably two in parallel on each day. We trust that you will be able to appropriately distribute yourselves across the tutorials, and switch to another tutorial if a session becomes too crowded. To coordinate a bit, I suggest you *like* the post of the tutor that has the code of the MS Teams session that you want to join, so the others get an idea how many want to attend a particular session.

Things will presumably become much easier once the final tutorial groups are settled. Thank you for your understanding!

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear students,

yesterday was the deadline for the first (voluntary) theoretical sheet. We want to offer tutorials in which the sheet can be discussed next week, probably making use of the lecture time slots on Monday 4-6pm and Tuesday 2-4pm. Please check the CMS news and the forum regularly to not miss on any update regarding this (make sure to login to the forum once to activate your account).

Over the last few weeks, we were evaluating the options on how to run the lecture given the COVID-19 situation. For the tutorials next week, and probably for the tutorials throughout the course and most of the lectures, we have decided to use Microsoft Teams.

There will be a group in MS Teams which is used for the lecture and a separate group for each tutorial. For the lecture group, we have posted the registration code in the forum (in the MS Teams app, join a team using this code). For the tutorials, we will probably post registration codes, too, later this week (these will only be valid for the first tutorial next week; we will set-up new groups in MS Teams once the final tutorial assignment is done in the first week of May).

Please set-up your student MS Teams account, if you have not already done so, and register for the lecture group.

Best regards,

Daniel

Dear Students,

we uploaded slides and a podcast (About This Course) for you in the Information > Materials section where we explain how we will - based on the current state of planning - proceed with this lecture.

We also made available for you 2 lectures if you like to get started with the course. There will also be a voluntary exercise sheet if you want to practice your knowledge. Note that this material is voluntary and will not count for the exam. However, it gives you a good introduction into the field of AI before we resume with the official course program for this semester in May.

All the best and take care

Your AI lecture Team

Dear students,

please register as soon as possible if you intend to attend the AI lecture. The registration deadline is currently set to May 5. Earlier registrations help us to plan the online resources for this course. Tutorial registration ends on May 7.

The official start of the summer term has been postponed to May 4. However, starting from April 6, we will make a few lectures and an assignment sheet available online such that you can begin working. The sheets will be voluntary and you cannot earn extra points towards exam admission, following the faculty guideline.

Looking forward to work with you!

Prof. Jana Koehler

Prof. Jörg Hoffmann